(Rome) Men, some of whom were armed with knives, and who could be illegally embarked migrants, briefly took control on Friday off Naples of a Turkish cargo ship en route to France, until the intervention of the forces Italian specials.
About fifteen people constrained the crew after being discovered in the Galata Seawaysa merchant ship that was then cruising off the island of Ischia, in the Neapolitan Gulf (south), according to the Italian Ministry of Defense, government sources at AFP and Italian media.
The commander, after having alerted the authorities in Ankara, was “kidnapped” with his men under the threat of “daggers” brandished by some assailants who tried to “hijack” the ship, said Defense Minister Guido Crosetto, who mentioned an act of piracy.
The cargo, which was en route to France, then “significantly deviated from its trajectory”, according to the Ansa agency.
Warned by Turkey, the Italian authorities deployed the helicopter-borne special forces of the Navy who quickly surrounded the ship and carried out arrests.
According to a government source contacted by AFP, the attackers could be migrants but the investigation will have to determine where and when they boarded the cargo ship.
The daily La Repubblica understands that the 22 crew members were taken to safety, as well as three “passengers”, while the 15 attackers were “neutralized”. Authorities did not report any injuries.
The government source confirmed to AFP in the evening that the Italian soldiers had regained control of the situation and brought the crew to safety.
The ship was in the port of Naples on Friday evening, according to real-time data from marinetraffic.com. Il Mattinoa daily newspaper in Campania, of which Naples is the capital, confirmed that the cargo ship had been taken to the harbor of the Parthenopean city.
Investigators and intervention teams from the national police and the customs police came on board to conduct the first investigations and search for any entrenched illegal immigrants. An investigation has been opened for “sequestration” and “attempted embezzlement”.
The Turkish road
The cargo ship, nearly 200 meters long and about 20 wide, “is very large and it is not difficult to hide in it”, noted Minister Crosetto, co-founder on television on Friday evening. , with the current head of government Giorgia Meloni, of the far-right Fratelli d’Italia party, which came to power in the fall of 2022 on the promise of curbing the arrival of migrants in the Mediterranean.
“When they heard the helicopter (special forces, some of the stowaways) hid (in the boat) probably hoping to escape by sea during the night,” the minister continued.
The vessel is a Turkish-flagged ro-ro ship carrying trucks. Specialized sites indicate that he left Topcular in Turkey on June 7 for Sète, in the south of France, where he was to arrive on Saturday.
Asked by AFP, the Maritime Prefecture of the Mediterranean confirmed that the boat was transporting freight to the port of Sète.
Two helicopters from the Italian Navy, as well as resources from the coast guard and customs police, were involved in the operation.
If tens of thousands of migrants try to reach Europe each year through Italy by crossing the Mediterranean from North Africa, arrivals on the coasts of the peninsula from Turkey are rare.
At the end of February, however, 94 people perished a few dozen meters from the Italian coast, not far from Cutro in Calabria in the south of the country, in the sinking of their boat, which left Turkey.